Special Attorney Ed Martin’s exchange of letters this week with the lawyer, Abbe Lowell, for New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, suggested a startling bargain — the Empire State’s top prosecutor, one of President Trump’s most ardent antagonists, could resign in exchange for avoiding criminal charges. 

Mr. Martin, who has been tasked by Attorney General Pam Bondi with investigating Ms. James and Senator Adam Schiff for mortgage fraud, wrote to Mr. Lowell that his client’s “resignation from office would give the people of New York and America more peace than proceeding. I would take this as an act of good faith.”

Mr. Lowell, whose list of clients includes Hunter Biden and Jared and Ivanka Trump, responded to Mr. Martin: “Just four days into your role” … with “no search for facts or questions of law,” you called for Ms. James to resign. The DOJ “has firm policies against using investigations and against using prosecutorial power for achieving political ends.”

Mr. Martin previously served as acting United States attorney for the District of Columbia and now quarterbacks the mortgage fraud investigations into Ms. James and Mr. Schiff. He also directs the Weaponization Working Group and serves as the United States pardon attorney. His letter to Mr. Lowell contends that Ms. James “would best serve the ‘good of the state and nation’ by resigning from office to address the issues in the referral.”

The referral in question came from the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte. Mr. Pulte, the heir to a home building empire, alleges that Ms. James lied on at least three separate mortgage documents. He accuses her of listing a modest Norfolk, Virginia, home as her primary residence, undercounting the number of units in a Brooklyn brownstone, and listing her father as her husband to secure the same. On Friday, Mr. Martin, clad in a beige trenchcoat, paid a visit to the brownstone in question, on Lafayette Street.

When a neighbor of Ms. James asked Mr. Martin why he was scouting out the Clinton Hill environs, he responded: “I’m just looking at houses.” He later told Fox News, “I’m a prosecutor … I wanted to lay eyes on it … I wanted to see the property.” Mr. Martin has never served as a prosecutor before his temporary appointment to the D.C. United States attorney’s office. Mr. Lowell calls the case against Ms. James “threadbare” and “cherry-picked.”

ABC News reports that “both Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche,” told Mr. Martin that his visit to Ms. James’s home “was unhelpful and counterproductive.” Mr. Lowell wrote to Mr. Martin that “despite the lack of evidence or law, you will take whatever actions you have been directed to take to make good on President Trump’s and Attorney General Bondi’s calls for revenge.”

Neither Ms. Bondi nor Mr. Trump have explicitly called for revenge, though both have decried what they call the weaponization of government during the interregnum between Mr. Trump’s two terms. Ms. James has been singled out by Republicans for weaponizing the New York courts against Mr. Trump when she sued the Trump family over —  ironically — mortgage fraud, among other offenses. 

Mr. Trump has remarked that the aggression with which Democratic officials pursued him during his post-presidency has made him re-think his prior approach to let bygones be bygones and that he’s supportive of prosecuting them for what he reckons to be legitimate crimes. Mr. Lowell, whose bills are being paid at least in part by New York taxpayers, has maintained since he was first retained by Ms. James that the case against his client resembles nothing so much as a “revenge tour.”  

Mr. Lowell goes on to explain in a letter sent earlier this week that the bar on mixing prosecution and politics is “ever more the case when that demand” — meaning for Ms. James’s resignation — “is made to seek political revenge against a public official in the opposite party of the Administration. Let me be clear: that will not happen here.” Ms. James next faces voters in 2026.

Promising to prosecute Mr. Trump, though, has been a long-standing staple of Ms. James’s pursuit of elected office. On the night she was elected in 2018 she pledged to shine “a bright light into every dark corner” of Mr. Trump’s “real estate dealings, and every dealing, demanding truthfulness at every turn.” She made good on that promise when she secured a civil fraud verdict against him in 2024. That judgement now stands north of $500 million.

Mr. Trump has appealed, and despite what appeared to be skepticism on the part of the appellate court toward Judge Arthur Engoron’s handling of the trial — one appeals judge reckoned that the “immense penalty in this case is troubling” and another likened the facts to a “commercial dispute” — no verdict has come down more than 300 days after oral arguments were aired.

Now Mr. Lowell is claiming that the intensifying scrutiny on his client is due to her courtroom success against the 47th president. In a footnote appended to his last missive to Mr. Martin, he quotes an American Bar Association’s mandate: “A prosecutor should not use other improper considerations, such as partisan or political or personal considerations, in exercising prosecutorial discretion.”